Google+ Comments For WordPress – With CommentLuv
Google+ Comments – Potentially Powerful Addition To Blog Comments
Google released Google+ Comments for its Blogger blogging platform and WordPress developers quickly ported it and a plugin version of Google+ Comments For WordPress. (Google Comments For WordPress has now become “Comments Evolved.”)
Google+ Comments For WordPress
Simply, the Google+ Comments system allows you post comments which show up on the blog-post and also your Google+ account. This gives the advantage of having your comment seen by your Google plus audience along with readers of the blog-post. It’s very easy to share your comments on Google+ to entire circles or to individual people.
Google+ Comments For WordPress: Plugin
There are several Google+ Comment plugins for WordPress, but I am using “Google+ Comments For WordPress,” by Brandon Holtsclaw. The beautiful thing about this plugin is that it also allows you to use other comment systems, such as WordPress Comments, Facebook Comments, and Disqus Comments. Beautiful!
As soon as I heard that there was a Google+ Comments for WordPress I thought I had to have it, but then the thought occurred to me that I might have to lose the ever popular CommentLuv plugin I was using with WordPress Comments. If you don’t know already, CommentLuv is a plugin that works with the WordPress comment system that encourages people to leave comments because they are able to posts links from their blogs (as you can see below).
After doing some research I found out that you could use the Google+ Comments plugin and also use the WordPress Comments. Great I thought until I read that CommentLuv would work with the Google+ Comments For WordPress plugin.
I didn’t want to lose the CommentLuv functionality, but at the same time I was interested in the possible SEO increase through the use of the Google+ plugin. This is from Google by the way, the software giant that determines your Google ranking. So I thought just let me try out a plugin and see what happens. I tried Google+ Comments For WordPress by Brandon Holtsclaw, because it had the best ranking, and I am glad I did try it.
To my surprise it included tabs with allowed the use of Facebook comments, Disqus comments, and though it included WordPress comments I wasn’t expecting CommentLuv to work. Guess what…
CommentLuv Works With Google+ Comments For WordPress By Brandon Holtsclaw
The plugin works flawlessly once I got it setup. Let me walk you through it. As you can see there are several Google+ Comments plugins available for download. The top one is the one you want. Just click install now and you are done.
After the install, my issue was that the comments wouldn’t show up. I didn’t realize at first but I received and error message that was at the top of the page in red, but because I wasn’t scrolled all the way up, I missed it. I don’t have a screen shot of the error message but what it said was the plugin would not be enabled because I wasn’t using the correct version of PHP. It needed to use no less than PHP 5.3 and I was running PHP 5.2.
I had to change the version of PHP that was being used on my web server. Either you can do it yourself, or you can contact you web service provider and ask them to do it for you. It shouldn’t to hard to do yourself if you web provider is using the latest software.
On my sever I was easily able to chose the latest version, PHP 5.4 by clicking a button and saving the setting. After that the Google+ Comments For WordPress showed up on my posts.
To access the Google+ Comments For WordPress admin panel click the comments tab on the WordPress left menu. Clicking the comments tab will reveal the WP Comments and the G+ Comments.
The “Tab Order” allows you to put the tabs in the order you want. Use the following values, separated by a comma, in the order you want your tabs to appear: wordpress,gplus,facebook,disqus,trackback.
If you are going to use a Disqus tab, you will need to use your Disqus short name. You can find your Disqus shortname by signing in to your account, going to your dashboard, and your shortname will be in parentheses.
Comment Area Label: Choose whatever description you want to display above your comments. My comment area label says, “Choose A Tab To Comment:.”
The last thing you will need to do is to chose labels for your WordPress label, Google+ label, Facebook label, Disqus label, and Trackback label.
Should I Put The WordPress Label First Or The Google+ Comments Label First?
Funny thing is I think I spent more time deciding which label I should put first than anything else. Good thing changing the order of the label is as easy as moving the words around in the Tab Order section of the admin panel. For now I decided to keep the WordPress Comments as the default tab. I have Google+ as the second tab. If I want to I can easily reverse the order at another time.
I was a bit concerned about using tabs because I want to make things as easy as possible for my commenters. Sometimes too many options can be daunting. I hope this won’t be an issue, but if it is using the WordPress Comments as the default tab should be the same as if I was only using the WordPress Comments and CommentLuv.
I also like that my WordPress comments are saved separately so I can always remove the plugin if I want too and still be able to keep my WordPress comments.
Styling The Google+ Comments For WordPress Tabs
First I would like to thank Ilene Smith for making me aware of the Google+ comments for WordPress. I was made aware through some of the comments make through the Google+ tab that it is easy to overlook the tabs because the way the are styled. Brandon may get around to styling the tabs, but I didn’t want to wait and chance that people who would make comments might get confused. I show you how to style the Google+ Comments tabs here.
Work To Improve Your SEO And Also Work To Improve Your Health
Though improving your SEO is important and Google+Comments For WordPress can turn out to be a useful WordPress SEO plugin, improving and maximizing your health is more important. Simply adding more whole-food plant-based life into your diet, while minimizing your meat and diary intake, can greatly maximize your health living.
Tags: "water"powered, "water"powered+commentluv, commentluv, google+ comments, wordpress